In press, Behavior Resarch Methods
Final draft of 29 March 2009
A comparative quantitative analysis of Greek orthographic transparency
Athanassios Protopapas
Eleni L. Vlahou
Institute for Language & Speech Processing
Institute for Language & Speech Processing
and University of Crete
Orthographic transparency refers to the systematicity in the mapping between orthographic
letter sequences and phonological phoneme sequences, in both directions: for reading and
spelling. Measures of transparency previously used in the analysis of orthographies of other
languages include regularity, consistency, and entropy. However, previous reports are typically hampered by severe restrictions such as using only monosyllables or only word-initial
phonemes. Greek is sufficiently transparent to allow complete sequential alignment between
graphemes and phonemes, therefore permitting full analyses at both letter and grapheme level
using every word in its entirety. Here we report multiple alternative measures of transparency
using both type and token counts and compare to estimates for other languages. We discuss
the problems stemming from restricted analysis sets and the implications for psycholinguistic
experimentation and computational modeling of reading and spelling.
al., 1995), while ambiguities in the feedback direction affect spelling performance (Lété, Peereman, & Fayol, 2008;
Burt & Blackwell, 2008). A counterintuitive finding is that
feedback inconsistency also affects reading. That is, words
with predictable pronunciation but unpredictable spelling are
read and recognized more slowly than words with predictable
spelling (Grainger & Ziegler, 2008; McKague, Davis, Pratt,
& Johnston, 2008). However, in a review of studies on feedback inconsistency effects, Kessler, Treiman, and Mullennix
(2008) pointed out a number of methodological shortcomings that need to be addressed before a final conclusion can
be reached. To pursue these issues in additional languages,
detailed quantification of orthographic consistency in both
directions is necessary.
Ambiguity does not affect all sublexical units equally. In
more opaque orthographies, smaller units tend to be less consistent than larger units (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). For
example, graphemes1 are less consistent than orthographic
bodies (spellings of a syllabic rime, i.e., of the nuclear vowel
and any consonants that follow it) in English monosyllables
(Treiman et al., 1995). There is thus a functional pressure
for readers to develop both small-unit and large-unit recoding strategies. As the grain size grows, the number of distinct orthographic units rises. This “granularity” problem is
more pervasive in opaque orthographies, whereas readers of
more transparent orthographies can focus on finer grain sizes
(Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). This assertion remains to be
substantiated with specific estimates of the transparency and
granularity of specific orthographic systems.
In the present work we address two issues: First, we provide a systematic quantitative exposition of transparency in
the Greek orthography. The goals of this presentation are
Alphabetic orthographies differ in their degree of transparency, that is, in the systematicity of the mapping between
letter sequences and phoneme sequences. Inconsistencies in
the sound-spelling mappings arise when single orthographic
units have multiple pronunciations or single phonological
units have multiple spellings. Quantitative assessments of
such ambiguities have been carried out in several languages
with alphabetic orthographic systems, both in the “feedforward” direction, that is, from orthography to phonology, as
needed for reading aloud printed words, and in the “feedback” direction, from phonology to orthography, as needed
for spelling (e.g., Borgwaldt, Hellwig, & De Groot, 2005,
2004; Treiman, Mullennix, Bijeljac-Babic, & RichmondWelty, 1995; Ziegler, Stone, & Jacobs, 1997; Ziegler, Jacobs,
& Stone, 1996).
The study of orthographic transparency is important for
theoretical and practical reasons, as ambiguous mappings
have been found to affect reading and spelling performance
(Spencer, 2007, submitted). For example, feedforwardinconsistent orthographic units (i.e. letter sequences that can
be pronounced in more than one way) slow down word naming (Burani, Barca, & Ellis, 2006; Jared, 2002; Treiman et
We thank Aimilios Chalamandaris and the ILSP text-to-speech
group for providing the text corpora and reference phonetic transcriptions, Elina Nomikou and Stella Drakopoulou for checking
CiV words, Aikaterini Pantoula for help with the monosyllables,
and Efthymia C. Kapnoula for help with the GPC rules.
The quantification of Greek orthographic transparency is part
of a larger ongoing effort at ILSP to provide psycholinguistic resources for the Greek language. Data tables, code implementing
graphophonemic conversion by rule, and other material may be
downloaded from speech.ilsp.gr/iplr/.
Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to A. Protopapas at ILSP, Artemidos 6 & Epidavrou, GR-151 25 Maroussi,
Greece; e-mail: [email protected]
1
A grapheme is the written representation of one phoneme, that
is, a letter or group of letters that correspond to a single phoneme
(Coltheart, 1978; Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler,
2001).
1
2
A. PROTOPAPAS & E. L. VLAHOU
to support researchers working on Greek with information
relevant to stimulus selection and experimental design, and
to provide researchers working in other orthographies with a
comparison reference. Second, we use Greek as a test case to
examine and evaluate a multitude of approaches to the quantification of orthographic transparency. By comparing and
contrasting various alternative methods that have been proposed in the literature we are able to test certain assumptions
underlying them and indicate weaknesses that may limit their
applicability. Thus, our analysis suggests, directly or indirectly, ways towards improving the quantification of orthographic transparency for future research.
In the following sections, we first present existing approaches to the quantification of orthographic transparency
in different alphabetic writing systems, discussing their
methodological strengths and weaknesses. We then introduce the most important aspects of the Greek orthography.
We report analyses of the transparency of Greek orthography, comparing and contrasting calculations of regularity and
consistency, based on a word-form list from a representative corpus of contemporary written Greek texts. We identify the grapheme-phoneme level of analysis as the most appropriate for Greek and we present statistics relating individual phonemes and graphemes, as well as an ordered set
of rules maximally capturing graphophonemic transcription.
Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for crosslinguistic evaluation of orthographic transparency, for learning to read and write in Greek, as well as for modeling reading Greek.
Quantitative indices of
orthographic transparency
Regularity
The regularity approach assumes the theoretical position
that there are “regular” mappings, governed by symbolic
transcription rules, and “irregular” mappings, which violate the rules. Under this framework, the problem consists
in the specification of a set of rules that relates individual
graphemes to the corresponding phonemes (for the feedforward direction; or the reverse for the feedback direction). In
cases where the mapping deviates from one-to-one, for example when a single grapheme can have multiple pronunciations, the most frequent mapping is considered regular and
the others irregular. Regular words are words whose pronunciation or spelling is correctly produced by the graphemephoneme correspondence rules of a language, while irregular or exception words are words whose pronunciation or
spelling cannot be predicted from these rules (Coltheart et
al., 2001; Ziegler, Perry, & Coltheart, 2003). Regularity is
thus conceptualized as a categorical distinction (Zevin & Seidenberg, 2006).
Ziegler, Perry, and Coltheart (2000) compared the degree
of regularity of English and German by examining the pronunciations produced by the sublexical reading route of the
“dual route cascaded” model (DRC; Coltheart et al., 2001)
when presented with monosyllabic words from each lan-
guage. By definition, the pronunciation produced by the sublexical route of the DRC will be wrong for every irregular
word as it will tend to regularize it, according to the specified
conversion rules of the language. Therefore, an evaluation of
the model’s performance provides an index of the degree of
regularity of the language. Using this rule-based approach,
Ziegler et al. found that the percentage of correct rule application is 90.4% for German as compared to 79.3% for English monosyllabic words. Because this approach has not yet
been applied to polysyllabic words, it is unknown whether
these are valid estimates for more representative samples.
Consistency
As an alternative to regularity, the consistency approach
forgoes the notion of rules. Consistency refers to the (lack
of) variability in the correspondences between the phonological and orthographic units of a language. For example, the
consistency of a grapheme (in the feedforward direction; or a
phoneme, in the feedback direction) decreases as the number
and relative frequency of its corresponding alternative pronunciations (or spellings, respectively) increases (e.g., Lété
et al., 2008; Perry, Ziegler, & Coltheart, 2002). Consistency
computations can be performed at the grapheme-phoneme
level or at larger grain sizes and can be dichotomous or
graded. In dichotomous analyses, a word (or smaller-size
unit) is considered consistent when there is only one possible mapping for it, or inconsistent when alternative mappings
are possible. In graded analyses, the measure of consistency
quantifies ambiguity by taking into account the relative frequency of alternative mappings and is expressed as the proportion of dominant mappings over the total number of occurrences of the base unit of analysis.
Consistency estimation based on grain sizes larger than
the phoneme-grapheme is a common approach for the English language because taking into account larger parts of
the syllable reduces ambiguity (Kessler & Treiman, 2001;
Peereman & Content, n.d.; Treiman et al., 1995; Ziegler et
al., 1997). Treiman et al. (1995) performed statistical analyses of the spelling-to-sound relations of English monosyllabic words with CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) structure. They found that the vowel unit is highly inconsistent
when examined individually or in combination with the initial consonant (head). But when the vowels were examined
together with the following consonants (forming rimes), the
English orthography appeared to be much more consistent.
Kessler and Treiman (2001) extended the analysis in both directions (reading and spelling). They introduced conditional
consistencies and permutation tests of significance to address
questions such as whether the rime is processed as a whole
or whether the influence of the intrarime units is symmetrical
(i.e., whether the vowel and the coda improve the consistency
of each other). They concluded that rimes are not processed
as individual units. Rather, the basic processing seems to
occur at a phonemic-graphemic level that takes into account
the context in which each phoneme-grapheme is found.
Based on the rime-body level and using a dichotomous
classification, Ziegler et al. (1996, 1997) performed bidi-
3
ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY IN GREEK
rectional statistical analyses of French and English monosyllabic monomorphemic words. A word was considered
consistent if there was a one-to-one correspondence between
the word’s spelling body and its phonological body. The results showed that the degree of inconsistency differs between
these languages and within each language between the feedforward and feedback direction. From the spelling point of
view, both English and French can be described as opaque
languages, as 79.1% of the French words and 72.3% of the
English words were feedback inconsistent. From the reading
perspective, 12.4% of the French words and 30.7% of the English words were feedforward inconsistent. Therefore both
languages are more consistent in the feedforward direction
but the asymmetry is much higher for French.
A severe limitation of the aforementioned studies is the
computation of consistency values based solely on monosyllabic words. Consistency measures based on a nonrandom
subset of words in a language may not constitute reliable estimates of the sound-spelling relations of this language as a
whole, insofar as polysyllables may have a different structure
from monosyllables of may be otherwise biased (Borgwaldt
et al., 2004; Kessler & Treiman, 2001; Lété et al., 2008).
Moreover, restriction of computations to monosyllables limits the potential for cross-linguistic comparisons, because
languages differ in the proportion of words that are monosyllables and possibly in the representativeness of monosyllables with respect to the full spectrum of orthographic mappings. Finally, analyses at the rime-body level may only be
justified for languages such as English, where smaller grain
sizes would lead to very low consistency estimates. In more
transparent orthographies, grapheme-phoneme mappings are
more consistent across the entire vocabulary, highlighting
the importance of selecting a cross-linguistically appropriate
level of analysis. These issues are addressed in the present
study by a comparative analysis at different grain sizes, using
an unabridged lexical database.
Entropy
The calculation of consistency as the proportion of majority mappings suffers from the inability to discriminate between cases with many and few alternatives, and between
nondominant mappings with substantial and negligible proportions. For example, in Greek, the phoneme [g]2 can
be spelled as either hγκi (85.5%) or hγγi (14.5%). The
phoneme [ç] can be spelled as hχi (85.0%), hοιi (7.0%), hιi
(6.9%), or as hειi, hχιi, hχειi and other combinations with
very low probability (less than 1% each). According to the
consistency index, these phonemes are equally consistent at
about 85%. However, their mappings are not equally unpredictable, because there is only one significant nondominant
option for [g] but two for [ç] (among several minor ones).
The consistency index cannot express this difference in the
ambiguity of mapping between the two phonemes.
This shortcoming can be remedied by resorting to entropy, a more sophisticated index of consistency, which assesses the same underlying concept but can take into account the complications arising from the entire distribution
of mappings and not only the dominant ones. Entropy is an
information-theoretic notion that quantifies uncertainty (i.e.,
lack of information; Shannon, 1948, 1950). In the context
of graphophonemic transparency, entropy quantifies ambiguity in the prediction of letters or graphemes by phonemes
and vice versa. If a given grapheme (phoneme) maps unambiguously to a specific phoneme (grapheme), then the
mapping is absolutely certain, that is, there is no ambiguity,
hence the corresponding entropy is zero. Entropy is high for
graphemes (phonemes) with many alternative pronunciations
(spellings), especially when there is not a single dominant
mapping.
For any unit of orthographic (or phonological) representation that maps onto n phonological (orthographic) alternatives with probability pi for the ith alternative, its entropy
(H) is calculated as the negative sum, over the alternative
mappings, of the products of each probability times its logarithm:
H=−
n
X
pi log2 pi
i=1
Using base-2 logarithms for the calculation results in a
quantification expressed in bits. For example, the entropy
of the [g] phoneme mentioned above would be −[0.855 ×
log2 (0.855) + 0.145 × log2 (0.145)] = 0.597 bits. To calculate
the total entropy associated with an entire set of units (letters,
graphemes, or phonemes), the contribution of each individual unit is weighed by its relative frequency of occurrence
before it is added to the total. Calculated in the same way,
the entropy of [ç] equals 0.827 bits.
Borgwaldt et al. (2004, 2005) performed analyses of entropy for English, Dutch, German, French, Hungarian, Italian and Portuguese. To overcome the limitations of restricting analysis to monosyllables, they focused on wordinitial sound-spelling correspondences using all the words in
each language. The restriction to word-initial mappings was
dictated by severe constraints on defining and segmenting
the units of analysis in a practical and cross-linguistically
uniform manner, due to difficulties in identifying the borders of graphemes within words, at least in some languages.
Borgwaldt et al. showed that none of the orthographies examined approached the ideal one-to-one mapping between letters and sounds and that word-initial letter entropy is significantly correlated with word naming latency in Italian, Dutch,
and English, three languages varying widely in orthographic
transparency. However, it remains to be empirically substantiated whether word-initial mappings constitute an unbiased
representative sample of all mappings. This is an important
issue we address empirically in the present study.
2
Greek letters and graphemes in text are shown within angle
brackets, to avoid confusion. Phonetic symbols refer to broadly
transcribed phonetic realizations, not to any presumed underlying
phonological representations, and are shown within square brackets.
4
A. PROTOPAPAS & E. L. VLAHOU
Type vs. token counts
An issue warranting further scrutiny concerns the nature
of the counts entering the calculations of transparency indices. In principle, consistency counts of sublexical units can
be performed based on either word-form or lemma databases
and on either type or token frequency counts. The difference
in database contents concerns items related via inflectional
morphology. That is, word-form databases contain morphological variants of the same lemma whereas lemma databases
contain only a “base” form. Type counts of sublexical units
consist in the number of items (word forms or lemmas) that
contain the unit in question. Token counts are calculated by
summing the frequency (number of occurrences in a text corpus) of the items that contain the unit.
The optimal choice between lemmata and word forms
depends on the researcher’s theoretical assumptions and
research goals (Hofmann, Stenneken, Conrad, & Jacobs,
2007). However, in lemma databases, the sublexical units of
the base form that are not present in the inflected forms are
overestimated, whereas units associated with inflections are
underestimated. This led Hofmann et al. to recommend using
word-form databases, especially when assessing language in
its natural, inflected form.
The choice between type vs. token measures remains controversial, as both seem to be independently associated with
lexical processing. Conrad, Carreiras, and Jacobs (2008)
showed that a token-based measure of syllable frequency
was associated with an inhibitory effect on lexical access
in a lexical-decision task, whereas a type-based measure
was associated with a facilitative effect. To account for the
contradictory findings, Conrad et al. proposed that the two
kinds of measures are related to different processing stages
during visual word recognition. In contrast, Moscoso del
Prado Martı́n, Ernestus, and Baayen (2004) have proposed
that a common, token-based mechanism can account for both
token- and type-based effects. They modeled Dutch past
tense formation with a simple recurrent network which exhibited token-based frequency effects and type-based analogical effects that closely matched the behavior of human
participants.
In the aforementioned studies employing entropy,
Borgwaldt et al. (2004) used word form types whereas
Borgwaldt et al. (2005) used lemma types. Neither option corresponds to the cumulative experience of readers and
spellers with the graphophonemic mappings because the frequency of occurrence of each word in written and spoken language was not taken into account. Insofar as the frequency
of occurrence of a word is among the strongest predictors
of how quickly it can be recognized or read aloud (Balota,
Yap, & Cortese, 2006), it might be preferable to measure
indices of transparency in terms of tokens instead of type
counts, using word forms weighted by the number of their
occurrences in a representative text or speech corpus. A more
conservative approach would take into account both type and
token frequency counts, following the recommendation of
Hofmann et al. (2007).
The Greek orthography
There are 32 phonemes in modern Greek at the level of
broad phonetic transcription (discounting idiolectal and optional variation), of which 5 are vowels. These are written with 24 letters (plus one final-only form), of which 7
correspond to vowels in isolation. Most words can be read
correctly on the basis of the letter sequence alone, without
the need for morphological or lexical information. However, spelling is more complicated, because it is determined
not only by phonological identity but also by morphological
type, for grammatical inflections, and by the historical origin,
for word stems tracing back to ancient Greek. There are two
letters for the vowel [o] (hοi, hωi) and two ways of spelling
[E] (hεi and the digraph hαιi); [u] is spelled with the digraph
hουi. There are six ways to spell [i] (hιi, hηi, hυi, hειi, hοιi,
hυιi). As there are fewer consonant letters than phonemes,
several consonants are spelled with digraphs. For example,
all voiced stops are spelled with a combination of the letters
for the corresponding unvoiced stop and the nasal at the same
place of articulation: [m]→hμi, [p]→hπi, [b]→hμπi. Palatal
consonants are spelled with the letter for the corresponding
velar consonant and one of the [i] graphemes. Despite these
and other complications, learning to read Greek is considered to be relatively easy, and online resources are available providing the necessary information (e.g., “The Greek
Alphabet” at http://www.xanthi.ilsp.gr/filog/ch1/
alphabet/alphabet.asp).
The Greek orthography is commonly characterized as
“transparent” or “shallow” despite a dearth of relevant quantitative data. In the classification of several European orthographic systems by Seymour, Aro, and Erskine (2003), in the
context of a cross-linguistic study on early stages of learning
to read, Greek occupied the second position, in order of decreasing orthogaphic transparency for reading, in the group
of languages with relatively simple syllabic structures, after
Finnish. However, There seems to be a great asymmetry in
the transparency of Greek orthography between the feedforward (reading) and feedback (spelling) direction. According to Porpodas (2006), in the feedforward direction “[t]he
Greek spelling system. . . [approaches] a 1:1 relationship between graphemes and phonemes. . . and can be characterized
as a shallow orthography in which, as a rule, pronunciation
is predictable from print”, whereas in the feedback direction
“Greek is phonologically opaque as there is a one-to-many
phoneme-grapheme mapping and therefore spelling cannot
always be predictable from phonology” (p. 192, emphasis in
original).
Consistent with the notion of rule-based predictability,
Petrounias (2002) has listed a set of rules for each direction
of conversion. However, according to Petrounias, some of
the rules apply only in words of the vernacular and are often
violated in words of literary or learned origin. As the origins
of each word are not necessarily clear to contemporary Greek
speakers, this diachronically systematic distinction constitutes a source of synchronic inconsistency. Petrounias lists
several cases of mappings between phonemes and letters,
which can be generally classified into one-to-one, one-to-
5
ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY IN GREEK
many, and many-to-one. Deviations from one-to-one include
both digraphs/diphones (i.e., phonemes spelled with two or
more letters, such as [b]→hμπi, or single letters pronounced
as two phonemes, such as hξi→[ks]) and context-dependent
transcriptions (i.e., phonemes spelled differently depending
on adjacent phonemes, e.g., [z]→hσvi before [v] vs. [z]→hζi
before [o], or letters pronounced differently depending on adjacent letters, e.g., hκi→[k] before hοi vs. hκi→[c] before
hεi).
Once the assumption of rules is made, the notion of regularity becomes relevant. Exceptions are only possible when
rules are defined to which they do not conform. In Greek
there are some clear exceptions, typically recent loans, which
violate the rules and are pronounced similar to their foreign
origin (at least by educated speakers). For example, Greek
has no way to spell [mp] or [nt] (and these clusters do not
occur within native words) because, as noted above, the corresponding letter combinations (hμi for [m] and hπi for [p];
hνi for [n] and hτi for [t]) are used as digraphs for the voiced
stops. Therefore, words such as σαμπάνια (“champagne”)
and κάμπινγκ (“camping”) that have entered the vocabulary
recently, are properly pronounced [sam"paña] and ["kampiNg], respectively, in violation of the grapheme-to-phoneme
rules.
The most pervasive issue of inconsistency and irregularity in the feedforward direction concerns the general phenomenon of CiV, that is, the occurrence of an [i] grapheme
preceded by a consonant and followed by a vowel. In every
such case there are two possible pronunciations: one that includes the [i] and one that includes a palatal consonant and
no [i]. In the former case the CiV is parsed into 3 graphemes
(C, i, V) and the i grapheme is indeed pronounced [i], as in
ήλιο (“helium”) pronounced ["ilio] and άδεια (“permission”)
pronounced ["aDia]. In the latter case the CiV is parsed either
into 2 graphemes (Ci, V), the Ci part corresponding to the
palatal consonant, as in ήλιο (“sun”) pronounced ["iLo], or
into 3 graphemes (C, i, V), in which case the palatal consonant actually corresponds to the i grapheme, as in άδεια
(“empty”) pronounced ["aDJa]. Note that, although homographs are used in this example to make the point most
clearly, there are in fact very few homographs of this sort.
For the vast majority of letter strings there is only one correct
(i.e., word-forming) parsing of the CiV. Compare, for example, ντόπιο→["dopço] vs. όπιο→["opio] and ζήλεια→["ziLa]
vs. τέλεια→["tElia].
Greek orthography marks lexical stress with a special diacritic. As noted by Petrounias (2002), the current spelling
convention for Greek regarding the stress diacritic contains
an element of inconsistency because its application depends
on the number of syllables and not only on the presence of
phonological stress. Specifically, monosyllables do not bear
a diacritic, whereas every word with two or more syllables
must bear a diacritic. This is phonologically appropriate in
the majority of cases, because most monosyllables are grammatical words that attach themselves metrically to adjacent
content words. Conversely, most polysyllables are content
words and bear phonological stress, which is always correctly marked with the diacritic. However, there are excep-
tions: Monosyllabic content words, which bear phonological
stress, are not marked with the diacritic due to the spelling
convention, whereas disyllabic function words, which do not
bear phonological stress, are written with a diacritic nonetheless (see Petrounias, 2002, pp. 533–534).
In addition to its metrical significance, the stress diacritic
sometimes helps disambiguate graphophonemic mappings,
because of spelling conventions concerning vowel digraphs.
For example, hειi and hείi constitute graphemes and are pronounced [i], whereas hέιi includes two graphemes and is pronounced [ei]. A diaeresis diacritic is also available, to disambiguate single vowel graphemes from digraphs, so hεϊi and
hεΐi are also bigraphemic, pronounced [ei].
In conclusion, there is a certain degree of complexity and
some inconsistency in Greek spelling at the level of individual letters and phonemes, in both directions. In the present
study we quantify it, comparing and contrasting results from
calculations of regularity, consistency, and entropy using
type and token counts from a word-form list derived from
a representative corpus of contemporary written Greek texts.
Because of the characteristics of Greek spelling, it is possible to calculate these indices for all words, regardless of
their length, and for all letters and phonemes of every word.
In this way we can address shortcomings of previous studies: Specifically, by applying all three approaches we can
examine whether different metrics of transparency may lead
to similar conclusions and predictions. Most importantly,
we can critically assess the validity of assumptions that have
led researchers to perform their analyses on restricted sets
of words (e.g., monosyllables) or parts thereof (e.g., word
beginnings or rimes).
Method
Text corpus
All analyses and counts were performed on a word list
derived in 2006 from the Hellenic National Corpus (HNC;
Hatzigeorgiu et al., 2000; http://hnc.ilsp.gr). This is
an evolving corpus of a great variety of post-1990 widely
circulated printed Greek texts including literary, journalistic, legal, and other texts from online news sources, newspapers, books, magazines, reports, proceedings, and brochures.
The raw texts available at the time were tokenized into
31,363,642 white space-separated tokens and condensed into
a list of 374,075 unique types with associated occurrence
counts (frequency). Items (.4% of tokens) including any
latin characters, numerals, or symbols were rejected, as
were items (5.3% of tokens) not found in an electronic dictionary with 1,622,668 entries covering all possible morphological variants of inflected words (“Symfonia;” Stathis
& Carayannis, 1999; http://www.ilsp.gr/correct eng
.html), resulting in a list of 217,664 unique word forms
(types) accounting for total 29,557,090 occurrences (tokens).
This word list was relatively free from spelling errors and
contained few idiosyncratic items such as proper names, foreign words not quite integrated as loans in the Greek language, or very low frequency words unlikely to be found in
the dictionary.
6
A. PROTOPAPAS & E. L. VLAHOU
Of the 24 letters in the Greek alphabet, seven (the “vowel
letters”) have variants bearing diacritics. Specifically, all 7
may be accompanied by an acute accent, indicating stress.
Two of these may carry diaeresis, indicating exception from
digraph combinations. Because both types of diacritics are
useful in phonological or lexical disambiguation, and because they are dictated by current spelling rules and their
omission is always a spelling error, the variants of these letters with diacritics (stress mark only, diaeresis only, or both)
were retained in the counts as separate letters. Including the
word-final variant ς, a total of 36 letters were used in the
analyses.
Phonetic transcription and post-processing
The list of orthographic types from the HNC was processed by a module producing phonetic representations of
words that was developed for a Text-to-Speech project
(Chalamandaris, Raptis, & Tsiakoulis, 2005). This module
has been extensively validated, is known to produce highly
accurate results, and has been in commercial and research
use for several years. The resulting list of phonological
types, corresponding to the HNC orthographic types, was
post-processed to maximize uniformity by simplifying optional pronunciations that might result in unnecessary, and
potentially misleading, complexity. Specifically, (a) all homorganic nasal obstruents preceding voiced stops were removed (e.g., [mb]→[b], [nd]→[d] etc.); (b) all [mpt] sequences were reduced to [mt]; and (c) all instances of [M]
were converted to [m]. These cases concern optional alternative pronunciations (phonologically and lexically nondistinctive) with variants freely alternating not only between dialects but also within dialects and talkers as a matter of sociolinguistic context or careful vs. relaxed articulation. In no
instance are the simplified versions used in the subsequent
analyses inappropriate, unusual, or otherwise marked. The
resulting set of 32 phonemes, 5 of which are vowels, suffice
to accurately and completely represent phonetically (broadly,
at the surface realization) every Greek word in standard modern pronunciation typical of major cities such as Athens. To
retain stress information, aiding in disambiguation, stressed
vowels were represented as separate phonemes, bringing the
total number of phonemes to 37.
In addition, all types containing CiV sequences were identified and submitted to manual verification. The CiV pattern was found in 17.9% of the corpus types, amounting to
6.6% of the tokens. A custom software presented each of the
38,926 orthographic CiV-types individually while simultaneously playing out a synthesized pronunciation of the phonetic string derived from the grapheme-to-phoneme module.
A listener indicated manually any errors in the transcription.
Types for which both alternative pronunciations were acceptable (e.g., hδιάλογοςi→[Di"aloGos] or ["DJaloGos]) were not
modified. As a result of this procedure, a revised list of phonetic types was generated.
Grapheme alignment
Minimal experimentation revealed that it was always possible to align the set of phonemes making up each phonetic
type with a set of graphemes making up the corresponding
orthographic type, such that all phonemes and all letters were
appropriately matched and none were left unassigned (no
null phonemes or null graphemes). In other words, a strictly
sequential grapheme-to-phoneme alignment is possible for
Greek, fully accounting for all letters and phonemes, with
the limitation that, because processing applies to individual
word units, sandhi is effectively ignored. For example, here
is the beginning of “the northern wind and the sun” fable,
aligned at the grapheme-phoneme level:
ο β ο ρ ι ά ς κι ο ή λι ο ς μ ά λ ω ν α ν
o v o R J "a s c o "i L o s m "a l o n a n
A custom software processed the orthographic and phonetic types lists with a greedy assignment algorithm using an
expanded list of possible phoneme-grapheme mappings originally based on Petrounias (2002, Table 15.2, pp. 498–502).
In the vast majority of cases, simply assigning the longest letter sequence matching the current phoneme resulted in correct parsing (i.e., one that accounted for all phonemes with
graphemes in the matching list and accounting for all letters
in the orthographic string). A few special cases were identified and treated separately, such as two-phoneme letters (hξi
and hψi) and context-dependent palatal allophonic variants
of [i], without affecting the strictly sequential principle of
alignment.
Results
Grapheme-phoneme consistency and entropy
There were 118 unique grapheme-phoneme mappings
(“sonographs,” in the terminology of Spencer, 2009)
accounting for the 147,398,522 (frequency-weighted)
phoneme-grapheme pairs in the complete corpus. Additional
grapheme-phoneme pairs are possible, phonotactically
and orthographically allowed, and may possibly occur in
very low frequency or loan words not included in this
corpus. Table 1 shows the occurring mappings, grouped and
counted by phoneme, and the proportion of occurrence for
each grapheme (over the total count of the corresponding
phoneme). The proportion of the most frequent grapheme
for each phoneme is displayed first, in a separate column
to the left of the smaller proportions following it. The
token sum of the most frequent grapheme for each phoneme
divided by the total number of grapheme-phoneme pairs
in the corpus is .803. To the extent that this ratio can be
considered to be a single-number estimate of the consistency
of phoneme-to-grapheme mapping, Greek is then 80.3%
consistent in the feedback (spelling) direction by token
count.
Table 2 shows the same mappings, grouped and counted
by grapheme, with the corresponding proportions now referring to sums over graphemes. By a similar calculation of an
estimate for the consistency of grapheme-to-phoneme map-
ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY IN GREEK
ping, Greek is 95.1% consistent in the feedforward (reading) direction. The grapheme unit size was selected as most
appropriate because the corresponding calculation using single letters instead of graphemes resulted in a very substantially lower consistency estimate (80.3%) and a greater number of mappings (173) in the reading direction. Table 3 lists
these and corresponding estimates derived from type counts.
Ignoring the stress diacritic and treating stressed and unstressed letters (and phonemes) as identical would result in
88 grapheme-phoneme mappings with an overall token consistency of 96.0% in the feedforward and 80.8% in the feedback direction.
Entropy values calculated following Borgwaldt et al.
(2004, p. 171) are listed in Table 4 under “Type counts.” In
addition, entropy values under “Token counts” were calculated using the frequency weighted word list as in the calculations of consistency above. Because of the difficulty in defining graphemes in less transparent orthographies, Borgwaldt
et al. used only word-initial mappings. Therefore we also list
calculations based on word-initial mappings, for comparison.
Table 4 also lists entropy for vowels and consonants separately, following Borgwaldt et al. (2005, except that lemma
type counts were not available for our corpus, so word form
type and token counts were used instead). The distinction between consonants and vowels was always made on the basis
of the phonemes (not letters) for each individual mapping, so
that a given letter might be counted as a vowel in one case
and as a consonant in another (e.g., hυi→[u] vs. hυi→[v]).
Regularity of graphophonemic conversion
Table A1 in the Appendix lists an ordered set of 80 rules
(originally based on the set of mappings in Petrounias, 2002,
pp. 498–502) that can transcribe correctly the complete text
corpus based on the word-form letter sequences only, without any additional information. Because of potential overlap or ambiguity, rules are ranked in fixed order such that
more specific rules take precedence over more general ones
(nonoverlapping rules, for which rank does not matter, are
listed in Greek alphabetical order). Many rules are actually
group rules in that each applies over a set of related letters
or letter combinations, specified in the Appendix, Table A2.
These sets indicate possible (not actual) combinations; full
expansion of the group rules using the complete letter sets indicated in Table A2 results in 4163 individual rules, of which
only 525 apply at least once in the analyzed corpus. Obligatory preceding and following contexts for the rules are fully
indicated in Table A1.
A number of rules are marked as “optional” because of the
ambiguous CiV sequences, which can be parsed in two ways.
Specifically, because the cases with palatal consonants are
more specific to the CiV phenomenon, whereas the [i] case
amounts simply to pronouncing each component of the CiV
as it would be pronounced in other contexts, the rule set in
Table A1 lists the palatal rules as special cases, having precedence over the more general mappings. Rules 8, 10, 23, 24,
29, 30, 41, 42, and 67 correspond to the two-grapheme parsings of the CiV, in which the Ci together map onto a palatal
7
consonant. Rules 17, 73, and 74 correspond to the threegrapheme parsings, in which the “unstressed i” grapheme
alone (set U in Tables A1 and A2) maps onto a palatal consonant. These special rules are listed as optional, because the
correct pronunciation, being lexically determined, cannot be
derived from orthographic or phonological information at the
grapheme-phoneme level. In the discussion, the term “CiV
rules” refers to (optional) rules that lead to a palatal consonant.
The number of times each rule actually applies and leads
to a correct pronunciation, divided by the number of times
the rule should apply according to the matching criteria and
its rank in the rule set, constitutes an estimate of the regularity for the rule, and is listed in Table A1, computed on token counts. Regularity estimates lower than 1.00 are caused
by (a) an optional rule taking precedence, and thus precluding application of a non-optional but lower-ranked alternative, (b) phonologically stressed syllables not orthographically marked with a diacritic due to the monosyllable rule
(rules 5, 71, 75, 77, and 79; see the section on stress and
monosyllables below), and (c) clear-cut cases of exceptions,
such as [mp] and [nt] in recent loans (the latter are quite
rare, accounting for .03–.56% of the corresponding digraph
rules).
At the word level, regularity can be calculated as the proportion of words read correctly on the basis of their orthography alone. A word is considered correct when all of its
phonemes are correctly mapped. When the optional rules
are included in the rule set, word-level regularity is 92.7%
(by token count). When the optional rules are removed from
the rule set, word-level regularity is 95.3%. Finally, when
optional rules are allowed to apply optionally, with either
outcome counting as correct, the word-level regularity estimate reaches 97.3%. This latter value surely overestimates
the regularity of the system because it sidesteps the whole
irregularity problem raised by the existence of the “optional”
rules. However, it is useful to keep in mind that there is a
certain order even in these cases because the ambiguity is
always between two well-defined alternatives and not totally
unpredictable as it might be in more opaque orthographies.
Stress and monosyllables
It is not possible to distinguish which disyllabic tokens in
the corpus bear phonological stress without examining the
phrase context of each individual occurence. It is, however,
possible, to reach an approximate estimate for the monosyllables, because examination of a sample of occurrences
indicates, in the vast majority of cases, whether a stressed
or unstressed reading strongly predominates. Therefore, to
estimate the effect inconsistencies in application of the orthographic stress diacritic relative to the phonological stress,
we classified all monosyllables in the corpus according to
whether they bear phonological stress or not (the cumulative
frequency of unclassifiable monosyllable types was negligible).
There were 466 monosyllabic types (0.2%) accounting for
37.6% of the total token count (11,108,247 tokens). Of these
8
A. PROTOPAPAS & E. L. VLAHOU
Table 1
Phoneme to grapheme mappings, grouped by phoneme and sorted by within-phoneme proportions. Each line refers to a single
phoneme-grapheme mapping in the corpus. F: Relative frequency (percent occurrences of all phoneme tokens) of this phoneme
in the corpus. Pair proportion: Percentage of this phoneme-grapheme pair as a proportion of all occurrences (tokens) of this
phoneme. The proportion of the dominant mapping is listed first, on the the left; other mappings follow, on the right. A
minimum of one significant digit is shown.
Pair proportion (%)
Pair proportion (%)
Grapheme
Highest
Other
Phoneme
F (%)
Grapheme
Highest
Other
α
100.0
ννι
1.5
μπ
100.0
νει
.11
κ
97.2
o
6.87
ο
76.7
κι
2.6
ω
23.3
κκ
.17
p
4.22
π
99.9
κυ
.02
ππ
.05
κει
.0006
ps
.16
ψ
100.0
d
.56
ντ
100.0
R
4.59
ρ
99.5
D
1.87
δ
100.0
ρρ
.48
E
6.71
ε
78.0
s
8.34
σv
54.6
αι
22.0
ς
44.8
f
1.35
φ
66.5
σvσv
.57
υ
28.6
ţ
.04
τσv
89.4
ύ
4.8
τς
10.6
υφ
.06
t
8.43
τ
99.9
ύφ
.01
ττ
.14
g
.08
γκ
85.5
T
1.27
θ
100.0
γγ
14.5
u
2.14
ου
100.0
é
.07
γκ
57.9
v
.82
β
77.5
γγ
41.6
υ
14.5
γκι
.38
ύ
7.9
γγι
.09
ββ
.03
N
.03
γ
95.1
υβ
.004
ν
4.9
x
.74
χ
100.0
i
10.77
η
39.1
ç
.67
χ
85.0
ι
33.6
οι
7.0
ει
10.8
ι
6.9
υ
10.7
ει
.60
οι
5.3
χι
.39
ϊ
.41
χει
.09
ϋ
.09
υ
.08
υι
.02
χυ
.001
J
.72
γ
71.5
z
.59
ζ
57.1
ι
22.1
σv
42.9
γι
6.1
dz
.01
τζ
92.9
ει
.17
ντζ
7.1
γυ
.11
"a
2.21
ά
95.2
υ
.04
α
4.8
γει
.01
"E
2.60
έ
79.6
G
.78
γ
99.9
ε
12.8
γγ
.07
αί
7.4
k
2.16
κ
99.6
αι
.15
κκ
.38
"i
4.40
ή
33.7
ks
.47
ξ
99.1
ί
29.7
l
2.43
λ
86.7
εί
20.1
λλ
13.3
ύ
9.9
L
.04
λι
69.6
οί
4.3
λει
23.1
ι
.91
λλι
7.3
η
.70
m
3.34
μ
96.8
ει
.57
μμ
3.0
ΐ
.05
μπ
.19
ΰ
.0005
n
6.25
ν
99.8
υί
.0003
νν
.23
"o
3.29
ό
72.7
ñ
.05
νι
72.9
ώ
24.7
ι
16.6
ω
1.5
υ
3.7
ο
1.0
οι
3.6
"u
.54
ού
99.4
νοι
1.6
ου
.58
Note: Phoneme pairs [ks] and [ps] appear under “Phoneme” because they map to single letters hξi and hψi, respectively. This results in
slight overestimation of consistency for [k], [p], and [s].
Phoneme
a
b
c
F (%)
8.26
.18
1.96
ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY IN GREEK
9
Table 2
Grapheme to phoneme mappings, grouped by grapheme and sorted by within-grapheme proportions. Each line refers to a
single grapheme-phoneme mapping. F: Relative frequency (percent occurrences of all grapheme tokens) of this grapheme in
the corpus. Pair proportion: Percentage of this grapheme-phoneme pair as a proportion of all occurrences (tokens) of this
grapheme. The proportion of the dominant mapping is listed first, on the the left; other mappings follow, on the right. A
minimum of one significant digit is shown.
Pair proportion (%)
Pair proportion (%)
Phoneme
Highest
Other
Grapheme
F (%)
Phoneme
Highest
Other
a
98.7
ν
6.23
n
100.0
"a
1.3
N
.03
ά
2.11
"a
100.0
νει
.00
ñ
100.0
αι
1.48
E
99.7
νι
.04
ñ
100.0
"E
.3
νν
.01
n
100.0
αί
.19
"E
100.0
ννι
.00
ñ
100.0
β
.64
v
100.0
νοι
.00
ñ
100.0
ββ
.00
v
100.0
ντ
.56
d
100.0
γ
1.33
G
58.7
ντζ
.00
dz
100.0
J
38.9
ξ
.47
ks
100.0
N
2.4
ο
5.30
o
99.4
γγ
.04
é
72.3
"o
.6
g
26.5
ό
2.39
"o
100.0
G
1.2
οι
.62
i
92.1
γγι
.00
é
100.0
ç
7.5
γει
.00
J
100.0
ñ
.3
γι
.04
J
100.0
οί
.19
"i
100.0
γκ
.11
g
60.8
ου
2.14
u
99.9
é
39.2
"u
.1
γκι
.00
é
100.0
ού
.53
"u
100.0
γυ
.00
J
100.0
π
4.22
p
100.0
δ
1.87
D
100.0
ππ
.00
p
100.0
ε
5.56
E
94.0
ρ
4.56
R
100.0
"E
6.0
ρρ
.02
R
100.0
έ
2.07
"E
100.0
σv
4.81
s
94.7
ει
1.19
i
97.4
z
5.3
"i
2.1
ς
3.74
s
100.0
ç
.3
σvσv
.05
s
100.0
J
.1
τ
8.41
t
100.0
εί
.89
"i
100.0
τζ
.01
dz
100.0
ζ
.34
z
100.0
τσv
.04
ţ
100.0
η
4.24
i
99.3
τς
.00
ţ
100.0
"i
.7
ττ
.01
t
100.0
ή
1.48
"i
100.0
υ
1.67
i
69.4
θ
1.27
T
100.0
f
23.3
ι
3.87
i
93.4
v
7.2
J
4.1
ñ
.1
ç
1.2
ç
.03
"i
1.0
J
.02
ñ
.2
ύ
.57
"i
76.9
ί
1.31
"i
100.0
f
11.6
ϊ
.04
i
100.0
v
11.5
ΐ
.00
"i
100.0
ϋ
.01
i
100.0
κ
4.05
k
53.0
ΰ
.00
"i
100.0
c
47.0
υβ
.00
v
100.0
κει
.00
c
100.0
υι
.00
i
100.0
κι
.05
c
100.0
υί
.00
"i
100.0
κκ
.01
k
70.9
υφ
.00
f
100.0
c
29.1
ύφ
.00
f
100.0
κυ
.00
c
100.0
φ
.90
f
100.0
λ
2.10
l
100.0
χ
1.31
x
56.4
λει
.01
L
100.0
ç
43.6
λι
.03
L
100.0
χει
.00
ç
100.0
λλ
.32
l
100.0
χι
.00
ç
100.0
λλι
.00
L
100.0
χυ
.00
ç
100.0
μ
3.24
m
100.0
ψ
.16
ps
100.0
μμ
.10
m
100.0
ω
1.65
o
97.0
μπ
.18
b
96.6
"o
3.0
m
3.4
ώ
.81
"o
100.0
Note: Phoneme pairs [ks] and [ps] appear under “Phoneme” because single letters hξi and hψi, respectively, map to them.
Grapheme
α
F (%)
8.37
10
A. PROTOPAPAS & E. L. VLAHOU
Table 3
Statistics related to the transparency of Greek orthography. Mean pairs: average number of mappings from a single source unit
(letter, grapheme, or phoneme). Total consistency, in percent. V:C is the ratio of vowel to consonant phonemes. Type-Token
and Entropy-Consistency: Correlation coefficients calculated as Spearman’s ρ between counts/estimates for the corresponding
units of each mapping (N=Total pairs). Gra/Phoneme: unique grapheme-phoneme pairs.
Type counts
Token counts
Mapping
Total Mean TypeTotal
EntropyTotal
Entropyfrom
to
pairs pairs Token consist. Consist.
V:C
consist. Consist.
V:C
Grapheme
Phoneme
118
1.40
.93
95.7
−.991
.873
95.1
−.986
.915
Letter
Gra/Phoneme
173
4.81
.91
82.5
−.931
.930
80.3
−.933
1.019
1st letter
Gra/Phoneme
64
2.06
.81
93.8
−.963
.567
90.9
−.971
.481
1st letter
Phoneme
54
1.74
.78
93.8
−.954
.567
91.3
−.975
.481
Phoneme
Grapheme
118
3.03
.93
82.9
−.824
.873
80.3
−.810
.915
1st phoneme Grapheme
64
1.78
.85
93.3
−.913
.567
93.8
−.948
.481
1st phoneme Letter
54
1.46
.78
93.5
−.976
.567
94.3
−.992
.481
st
st
Note: There are fewer mappings from 1 letter to phoneme than from from 1 letter to grapheme-phoneme pairs, because the
same letter may map onto the same phoneme as a member of different graphemes.
Table 4
Entropy values for the Greek othography, in both mapping directions, for all entire words and for word-initial units only. Calculations were done both on the type counts (unique word forms) and the token counts (frequency weighted). Gra/Phoneme:
unique grapheme-phoneme pairs.
Mapping
Type counts
Token counts
from
to
Total
Vowels
Consonants
Total
Vowels
Consonants
Grapheme
Phoneme
.163
.033
.198
.167
.085
.177
Letter
Gra/Phoneme
.786
.817
.643
.801
.977
.515
1st letter
Gra/Phoneme
.290
.271
.301
.330
.520
.239
1st letter
Phoneme
.275
.265
.282
.308
.513
.209
Phoneme
Grapheme
.589
.886
.330
.645
1.010
.311
1st phoneme
Grapheme
.277
.406
.203
.251
.626
.071
1st phoneme
Letter
.262
.400
.184
.229
.619
.041
466 word forms, we identified 352 (79.6%) bearing phonological stress, including 94 native Greek words, 189 recent
loans (mainly from English, such as “bar,” “goal” etc.), 35
exclamatory and onomatopoetic items, some stress-bearing
function words, and more than 50 abbreviations either retaining the stressed syllable of the original or having been lexicalized. The total token count of these types was 743,694,
i.e., 6.7% of the total monosyllable token count and 2.5% of
the corpus. There were also 90 types not bearing phonological stress, primarily function words but also including
some abbreviations retaining an unstressed syllable; these
accounted for 10,341,231 tokens or 93.3% of the monosyllabic tokens and 35.0% of the corpus. Therefore, as far as
monosyllables are concerned, the lack of diacritic demanded
by spelling convention coincides with a lack of phonological
stress at an estimated rate of more than 90%. Thus, in the
reading direction, with respect to stress, the diacritic does not
seem to dramatically affect the overall consistency estimate,
as expected from the small effect on regularity for the vowel
rules noted above.
Discussion
Greek orthography is sufficiently consistent that we have
been able to segment and analyze a complete corpus sequentially into graphemes and their relation to phonemes. Our
analyses indicate that the grapheme level is appropriate for
expressing the widely perceived notion that Greek is simpler
to read than to write, because it is at this level that consistency and entropy estimates come out strongly asymmetric
in favor of the feedforward direction. Specifically, in the
feedforward direction, consistency estimates for individual
graphemes range from 53.0% for hκi and 56.4% for hχi to
100.0% for the majority of graphemes. In the feedback direction, consistency estimates for individual phonemes range
from 39.1% for hii (33.7% for stressed hii) to 100.0% for a
small minority of phonemes. A non-parametric comparison
of the 84 grapheme consistency estimates to the 39 phoneme
consistency estimates confirms that the asymmetry is significant (Mann-Whitney U=761.5, Z=-5.33, asymptotic twotailed p < .0005; the same result is obtained if consistency
estimates are weighted by unit token frequency: U=990.0,
Z=-3.52, p < .0005). It was also clear in the overall counts,
where spelling inconsistency (proportion of nondominant
ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY IN GREEK
mappings) at the grapheme-phoneme level (19.7%) was four
times as large as reading inconsistency (4.9%).
A factor frequently overlooked in orthographic analyses and in reading models concerns suprasegmental features
and their orthographic notation, namely stress and metrical patterns and corresponding diacritics that signify them.
We have confirmed that the Greek stress diacritic constitutes an additional source of orthographic information, contributing somewhat to overall inconsistency at the metrical
level, due to the peculiarities of the spelling rules. Further research in stress-assigning languages should take stress
and the diacritics into account, aiming for a full analysis
of the orthographic system at multiple levels. Here, the
presence of the diacritic does not reduce inconsistency at
the grapheme-phoneme level, because ignoring it results in
fewer grapheme-phoneme pairs and because its disambiguating role becomes apparent in grapheme segmentation, not
in mapping to and from phonemes. Therefore, any beneficial effects of the diacritic would be discernible only in predictability (or regularity) and not in consistency.
In the following, we compare our findings to those from
different orthographies and methodologies, discussing the
advantages and limitations of different approaches. In addition, we consider two special issues of particular importance, namely the consistency-predictability distinction and
the status of the CiV ambiguity.
Cross-linguistic comparisons
The regularity of graphophonemic conversion at the word
level (95.3%, excluding the “optional” rules) was found to
be higher for Greek than for German (90.4%) or English
(79.3%) as reported by Ziegler et al. (2000). However, these
numbers may not be directly comparable, because German
and English estimates were derived on the basis of monosyllables only.
The overall consistency for Greek at the graphemephoneme level was 95.1% in the feedforward and 80.3% in
the feedback direction. There are few directly comparable estimates from other languages. According to Spencer (2007,
p. 306), Hanna, Hanna, and Hodges (1966) reported a feedback consistency of 73% at the phoneme-grapheme level,
corresponding to 50% at the word level. However, summation of the most frequent sonograph probabilities for each of
the 163 graphemes and for each of the 39 phonemes in the
“adult 3K” corpus of Spencer (2009, supplemental material,
Appendix C) would result in consistency estimates of 77.6%
and 57.0% for the feedforward and feedback directions, respectively, at the grapheme-phoneme level.
Ziegler et al. (1996, 1997) examined only spelling bodies
(rimes) of monosyllables and reported their bottom-line findings in terms of proportion of words that admit more than a
single mapping. They considered the presence of any alternatives as indicative of inconsistency regardless of the relative proportion of alternatives, and they did not distinguish
dominant from other mappings. Therefore, their estimates
for French (79.1% spelling-inconsistent and 12.4% readinginconsistent) and English (72.3% and 30.7%, respectively)
11
may be gross overestimates of the overall inconsistency of
those orthographic systems.
On the basis of the entropy results for word-initial letter
type counts, closely matching the methodology of Borgwaldt
et al. (2004), Greek is about equally ambiguous in both the
feedforward (1st letter → 1st phoneme, H = .275) and the
feedback (1st phoneme → 1st letter, H = .262) direction,
being similar to Dutch in reading and similar to French in
writing (comparing to Figure 1 of Borgwaldt et al., 2004,
p. 175). For reading, Greek is less transparent than Hungarian and more transparent than French, German, and English. For spelling, Greek is less transparent than Hungarian,
Dutch, and German, and more transparent than English.
Considering entropy calculations for vowels and consonants separately (and comparing to Figure 2 of Borgwaldt
et al., 2005, p. 219), for the feedforward (reading) direction
only, Greek is less transparent than Hungarian and Italian and
more transparent than Portuguese, Dutch, French, German
and English, as far as vowels are concerned. With respect
to consonants, Greek is only more transparent than French,
exceeding in consonant entropy all these other languages.
However, these cross-language comparisons are valid only
to the extent that word-initial mappings are representative of
the full words in every language.
Representativeness of analyzed words or word
parts
Previous studies of orthographic transparency have usually analyzed a small subset of all mappings that occur in the
written language. A common restriction seen in the literature is to analyze monosyllables only (Ziegler et al., 1996,
1997, 2000). Our results suggest that although this approach
may be justified for some languages such as English, it is not
appropriate for cross-linguistic comparisons.
Specifically, Greek has very few monosyllabic word forms
and the majority of them is not representative of the language. Most are function words, whereas others are recent loans and abbreviations, strongly atypical in their syllabic structure. Therefore no analysis based on monosyllables only could be expected to yield an outcome representative for the orthography of the language as a whole. In
English monosyllables are sufficiently numerous and diverse
to permit a meaningful analysis. However, it remains to be
systematically investigated whether findings from monosyllables can be generalized, due to possible differences from
polysyllables (Kessler & Treiman, 2001; Lété et al., 2008).
In the context of cross-linguistic investigations, with some
languages containing predominantly multisyllabic words, it
is important to extend analyses to more inclusive and representative samples of the vocabulary.
To overcome the monosyllable restriction and perform
meaningful cross-linguistic comparisons, Borgwaldt et al.
(2004, 2005) analyzed word-initial mappings using single
letters. For comparison, we have calculated entropy on
both word-initial only as well as full-word mappings (Table 4). The results show that, in the feedforward (reading) direction, using word-initial single-letter mapping to
12
A. PROTOPAPAS & E. L. VLAHOU
phonemes results in entropy values almost three times less
than values calculated over whole-word letter-to-phoneme
mappings and about twice as large as values calculated over
whole-word grapheme-to-phoneme mappings. In the feedback (spelling) direction, using word-initial mappings results
in entropy values less than half of the values calculated over
whole-word mappings, regardless of the target units (letters
or graphemes). Therefore, using word-initial letter mappings
in Greek results in a gross underestimation of orthographic
transparency compared to calculations over letters using the
entire words. This may be attributed to the nonrepresentativeness of word-initial mappings in failing to exhibit the full
spectrum of mapping complexities that may be encountered
in different parts of the words.
Breaking down the entropy analysis into separate calculations for vowels and consonants, we can compare the effect
of restricting our analysis to word-initial letters on the entropy estimates for each type of phoneme. Focusing on the
left side of Table 4 (type counts, to match the methodology
of Borgwaldt et al. as closely as possible), we see that, in
the feedforward direction, the entropy of word-initial vowels is somewhat lower than that of word-initial consonants,
whereas the reverse is true when full-word letter mappings
are considered. In the feedback direction, there are differences in the relative values of vowels and consonants depending on whether word-initial or full-word mappings are
taken into account, but the direction of the pairwise comparison remains unaffected. However, the relationship between
vowel and consonant entropy seems substantially distorted,
in both directions, in comparison with phoneme/grapheme
mappings.
Our results indicate that the restriction to word-initial
mappings may be vulnerable to systematic distortions due
to differences in the distribution of phonemes (and letters/graphemes) across word positions. In Greek, this may
be due to the relative proportion of vowels to consonants being much lower (about half) word-initially than it is overall
(see Table 3, columns “V:C”), perhaps reflecting the preponderance of CV syllables in the language. Word-initial mappings will be representative only insofar as the distribution
of syllable types in the language is uniform, that is, syllables
with consonantal onsets are as frequent as syllables without
onsets, and to the extent that onset and coda phonotactics and
spelling patterns are similar.
In languages with rime-level consistency, such as English, onset spelling patterns are not representative of all
spelling patterns. Indeed, some analyses of orthographic
transparency in English have focused on rimes only, ignoring onsets, because the rime is where most inconsistencies
seem to be encountered. In languages with a predominance
of CV syllables, such as Greek, onset spelling patterns will
be nonrepresentative in containing a larger proportion of consonants. If consonant mappings are not as consistent as
vowel mappings, then consistency estimates based on wordinitial mappings only are unlikely to constitute valid indices
for the language. Word-initial mappings may additionally
undersample the graphophonemic mapping space if certain
graphemes or phonemes cannot occur syllable-initially. Our
calculations suggest that both of these conditions are present
in Greek and thus the validity of using only word-initial mappings is questionable at best.
CiV and regularity
Whether or not the origin of the CiV inconsistency can
be diachronically traced to a distinction between vernacular
and literary vocabulary (Petrounias, 2002), it does not help
determine what is “regular” and what is “irregular” behavior.
The mapping (C, i, V) may be regular because it is more general; or the (Ci, V) mapping may be regular because in the
ordered rule set it must constitute a higher-precedence rule.
Further research will be needed to determine whether one of
the alternatives can be considered to be a rule, to which the
other alternative would constitute an exception.
In the linguistic sense, a “rule” may correspond to the “default” or “unmarked” behavior, that is, what happens when
nothing special applies. There is no quantitative implication
for the regularity corresponding to this rule. So, the regular German plural concerns a minority of nouns (Marcus,
Brinkmann, Clahsen, Wiese, & Pinker, 1995) whereas the
regular English past tense concerns a majority of verbs
(Pinker & Prince, 1988). In contrast, in the reading literature, “rules” tend to be interpreted as accounting for maximum regularity, thus English regular readings correspond to
the most frequent grapheme-phoneme mappings (Coltheart
et al., 2001). The former sense is theoretical and can be
investigated empirically with novel or otherwise unmarked
stimuli. The latter sense, however, is distributional and can
be examined by reference to the corpus data, by comparing
the frequency of application vs. non-application of rules in
question.
As shown in Table A1, all CiV rules, with the notable exception of rule 8 involving hγi, apply less often than not. This
suggests that the palatal pronunciation may be exceptional
and the [i] option regular. The great variability of observed
rates of application and the nonconformance of hγi to this
pattern limit the confidence of this assertion. Further analyses were undertaken by breaking down the group rules into
their constituent sets, by i-grapheme and by vowel; and further breaking down by stress (stressed vs. unstressed V) and
by position in the word (initial, medial, final syllable). In
each of these groupings, the CiV rules apply less often than
not in the great majority but not all cases. Therefore, from
an overall frequency perspective, the palatal readings of the
CiV clusters appear to constitute the exception rather than
the rule. However, the situation is not so clear if we take into
account the many different consonant-i-vowel combinations
that are possible.
The letter sets indicated in Table A2 cover all possible letter combinations whether or not they are ever encountered in
any word spellings. In fact, of the 3744 individual CiV rules
that can be obtained by fully expanding the 12 group rules
(rows 8, 10, 17, 23, 24, 29, 30, 41, 42, 67, 73, and 74 in
Table A1), only 650 letter combinations (“cases”) appear in
the corpus. Of these, in only 298 cases does the corresponding individual CiV rule actually apply at least once. The CiV
ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY IN GREEK
rule applies more often than not in 137 of these 298 cases,
but the sum token count of actual rule applications in cases
in which the CiV rule dominates (i.e., applies more often
than not) is approximately equal to the total count in cases
in which the rule appears to recede (50.2% vs. 49.8%). This
happens because the individual CiV rules dominate in fewer
but more frequent cases. Therefore, this corpus analysis cannot provide a clear answer to the question whether the CiV
rules correspond to the “regular” case in Greek grapheme-tophoneme mapping or, indeed, if a case for a regular/irregular
distinction can be made regarding this phenomenon.
Effects of boundaries and context on consistency
Analyses of consistency are necessarily limited to the
discrete units used in the computations, be they letters,
graphemes, or larger units. However, neighboring units may
affect the distribution of the mappings. Moreover, with the
exception of single letters, it is not always clear what constitutes a unit, that is, where the segmentation boundaries lie.
These issues are not captured by the consistency estimates.
However, they may influence the effects of consistency on
reading and spelling performance, if context is taken into account for processing at the basic phoneme-grapheme level
(Kessler & Treiman, 2001).
Mapping consistency is a notion distinct from predictability, because context may determine (or bias) the appropriate mapping among a set of alternatives. For example, [z]
can be spelled with hζi (57.1%) or hσvi (42.9%), so its consistency is only 57.1%. However, the correct spelling depends on the context: when a voiced consonant follows, it
is hσvi. Therefore, spelling of [z] is 100% predictable. In
this case, the low consistency of the phoneme is misleading in that the phonological context provides all necessary
information for spelling. Conversely, the grapheme hγιi is
always pronounced [J], so its consistency is 100%. However,
it is not possible to determine, from the letter sequence alone
(even taking context into account), whether the pair of letters hγιi constitute a grapheme or, rather, should be parsed as
two graphemes, hγi and hιi, to be pronounced [J] and [i], respectively. In this case the high consistency of the grapheme
belies the unpredictability of its status as a grapheme.
In the case of mapping phonemes to graphemes, the predictability of seemingly inconsistent phonemes can be estimated by examining the contexts of each phoneme in which
different graphemes appear. There are no known constraints
at the phonological level to the alternative spellings of vowels [i], [e], and [o], which are the major sources of inconsistency. In contrast, spelling of [z] is predictable, as noted
above; as is spelling of [s] (hςi at word end, hσvi otherwise).
Spellings for [v] and [f] are constrained in that the hυi variants may only appear after hαi, hεi, or hηi, though not obligatorily (cf. "klefti→κλέφτη, "psefti→ψεύτη). The palatal
consonants are also constrained. Spellings of [J], [ç], [c],
[é] with a single consonant letter appear only before a high
vowel ("cita→κοίτα,"çERi→χέρι), otherwise an i-grapheme
is added ("cali→κυάλι,"çoni→χιόνι). When preceded by a
same-voicing consonant, [J] and [ç] may be spelled with an i-
13
grapheme only ("tEtçEs→τέτοιες, "isçEs→ίσιες, "vJos→βιός;
but cf. "EsçEs→έσχες, "vJEs→βγες). Likewise, when preceded by [m], [ñ] is spelled with an i-grapheme only
(zi"mña→ζημιά; but there are exceptions: li"mña→Λημνιά).
By adding the phoneme tokens for [z], [ţ], and [s], for
which the correct spelling is entirely predictable, to the sum
of consistent mappings, we can derive an estimate of the
lower bound of predictability for Greek feedback mapping
(spelling) at about 84.3%. Is it useful to take context-based
predictability into account when considering effects of consistency on spelling performance? If consistency alone determines spelling difficulty then [z], [ţ], [s], and the palatal
consonants should be spelled incorrectly as frequently as the
vowels [i], [e], and [o], which are comparably inconsistent.
Although specific estimates of these spelling errors are not
yet available for Greek, the fact the vowel spellings are frequently studied but consonant spellings are not suggests that
grapheme-level consistency does not suffice and context or
multiple-size units may have to be taken into account in the
quantification of transparency that is relevant for psycholinguistic investigation.
Grain size of transparency analysis
Notwithstanding the occasional effects of context, our results suggest that the grapheme seems to be the appropriatesize unit for analyzing the transparency of Greek orthography. On the one hand, the smaller-size letter units are less
consistent and therefore unable to adequately capture the
systematicity in graphophonemic mappings. On the other
hand, no larger sublexical units, such as rimes, seem to be
necessary or useful, because resorting to larger units would
increase granularity without improving consistency. Larger
unit sizes would not help resolve the predominant source of
inconsistency in the feedforward direction, namely the CiV
cases, because those are determined lexically. The rime-body
level of analyzing English monosyllabic words is not appropriate for other languages with many polysyllabic words
as well: French pronunciation and spelling ambiguities are
not reduced when rime-body mappings are used instead of
grapheme-phoneme mappings (Lété et al., 2008; Peereman
& Content, n.d.).
The calculation of quantitative estimates of orthographic
transparency is not an end in itself. It is meaningful to the extent that it can contribute to the generation or testing of specific psycholinguistic hypothesis, or to the selection, control
and construction of proper experimental stimuli, for work
both within and between languages. An important issue concerns the psychological reality of different grain sizes across
languages. Analyses are often performed to minimize ambiguity. However, there is no a priori reason that maximizing
systematicity is a valid objective or that it results in estimates
that are relevant for modeling. A more solid foundation can
be sought in correlations between transparency analyses and
performance on reading tasks. If readers rely on a particular
orthographic and phonological grain size when they read (or
spell), then transparency measures based on the corresponding functional units will correlate more highly with perfor-
14
A. PROTOPAPAS & E. L. VLAHOU
mance on the reading (or spelling) tasks.
Along these lines, Treiman et al. (1995) showed that word
naming was affected not only by the consistency of individual graphemes but also by the consistency of reliable units
such as consonantal onsets and orthographic rimes. Performance was not affected by the consistency of less reliable
combinations such as the head (initial consonant and vowel).
Such findings seem to establish the psycholinguistic relevance of onset/rime units in English, where large ambiguities exist at the phoneme/grapheme level. More recently,
Borgwaldt et al. (2005) found that higher onset letter entropies (i.e., less consistent word-initial letter-phoneme mappings) were associated with longer naming latencies in Italian, Dutch, and English, three languages differing greatly in
orthographic transparency, and argued that letters are important functional units that should not be ignored in favor of
larger grain sizes. To make further progress on this issue,
additional research is needed, examining contrasting predictions from graphemes and other units of various sizes and
word positions, in both directions, across a variety of orthographies.
A comparison of entropy (or consistency) values calculated over graphemes vs. letters (first two rows of Tables 4
and 3) provides a clue towards resolving the unit issue for
Greek. Calculations using single letters result in very high
estimates of feedforward ambiguity—higher, in fact, than
the corresponding estimates for the feedback (spelling) direction. This contradicts the commonly held notion that
Greek is consistent for reading and inconsistent for spelling.
However, intuitive notions may well be incorrect. More importantly, these estimates seem to run counter to available
cross-linguistic data on the relative transparency of Greek,
such as the findings of Seymour et al. (2003), according to
which Greek is placed near the top of the list of transparent
orthographies, based on the accuracy and speed of reading
simple words and nonword by beginning readers (Grade 1).
Additional evidence consistent with the notion that Greek is
feedforward consistent and that the grapheme/phoneme is the
appropriate level of analysis (Goswami, Porpodas, & Wheelwright, 1997; Porpodas, Pantelis, & Hantziou, 1990; Porpodas, 1999) has been reviewed by Ziegler and Goswami
(2005). A more stringent test to determine the appropriate
level of analysis can be derived from our entropy data (Table 4). Specifically, in the feedforward direction, vowels are
more ambiguous than consonants at the letter level, but less
ambiguous at the grapheme level, and the difference is quite
substantial in both cases. Insofar as mapping consistency affects reading efficiency, we should expect vowels to affect
reading performance more than consonants, if the input is
analyzed at the single letter level, or less, if the input is analyzed by graphemes. Due to the rapid learning of letter combinations, such effects may only be discernible at the earliest
stages of learning to read, if at all.
In the preceding discussion we have assumed that there is
a single most appropriate level of analysis, psychologically
real and dominating sublexical reading performance. This
view is consistent with the DRC approach (Coltheart et al.,
2001), in which only grapheme/phoneme mappings are hy-
pothesized to exist in the nonlexical route, excluding largersize units (see also Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993,
p. 603, for empirical justification). However, it remains plausible that more than a single level of cross-code representation is psychologically real, consistent with the grain-size
theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005), which posits a developmental progression through multiple levels of representation, from coarser to finer, supported by the distributional
properties of the developing lexicon, such that denser lexical neighborhoods facilitate finer phonological analysis. In a
similar vein, Ehri (2005) describes the development of sightword vocabulary as a process of forming connections between not only graphemes and phonemes but also between
orthographic and phonological sublexical representations of
various sizes. At the final phase of this progression, readers
familiar with the alphabetic system of their language retain
entire words in memory. However, the importance of largersized units may be smaller in more transparent orthographies.
Comparisons among indices and counts
Alternative modes of quantifying transparency, based on
diverging functional hypotheses, may bear substantially on
the resolution of theoretical matters. For example, the notion
of regularity, critically hinging on the existence of rules, is
distinct from the notion of consistency, which requires a fixed
set of mappings among appropriate-sized units. The DRC
simulations of Coltheart et al. (2001) did not support the hypothesis that consistency may arise as an effect lexical neighborhoods. They interpreted consistency effects as caused by
the serial application of overlapping graphophonemic rules,
when the correct rule becomes activated after an inappropriate one. In contrast, Zevin and Seidenberg (2006) reviewed
graded consistency effects in word and nonword reading and
attributed them to the statistical properties of spelling-sound
mappings. They simulated previous behavioral findings with
a parallel distributed (PDP) model of reading aloud and concluded against graphophonemic mapping rules that are not
sensitive to their probability of application. In Greek, contrasting predictions regarding regularity and consistency may
be derived from the CiV pattern and the context effects on
consistency.
The notion of entropy has been introduced as a more comprehensive measure of consistency than the percentage of
dominant mappings, because it takes into account the relative
proportions of nondominant mappings, and not as a theoretically distinct construct. It remains to be empirically demonstrated whether entropy values are more psycholinguistically
relevant than consistency percentages. However, it may not
be simple to disentangle the two if they are too similar to lead
to differential predictions. For Greek, the correlations between consistency percentages and entropy values are listed
in Table 3 (columns “Entropy-Consistency”). The two indices correlate very highly, especially in the feedforward direction. There is some divergence in the feedback direction,
suggesting that situations like the [g]/[ç] example mentioned
in the introduction may allow differential predictions regarding the ease of initial learning to spell. With proper control
ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY IN GREEK
of the order and amount of teaching and practice for each
mapping, the most appropriate consistency index may be determined.
On the issue of type vs. token counts, our analyses do
not seems to offer directions for resolution. Even though
there are some differences in the results using the two kinds
of counts, comparisons preserve their direction and, usually,
their relative proportions, both for entropy (Table 4) and for
consistency percentages (Table 3). In the feedforward direction, using type or token counts does not seem to affect total
entropy or consistency values very much. In the feedback
direction, using type counts leads to higher total entropy estimates on whole-word mappings but lower on word-initial
mappings, compared to using token counts. The relative difference in entropy values follows the correlation between
type and token counts (listed in Table 3, column “TypeToken”). Using types instead of tokens has the largest effect for mappings between word-initial phonemes and letters,
that is, in the condition chosen by Borgwaldt et al. (2004) for
their calculations. However, as noted above, this condition
does not seem to be the most appropriate one. The choice
between type and token counts, then, remains to be made on
the basis of psycholinguistic evidence and theory of the sort
discussed by Conrad et al. (2008).
Conclusion
In this work, we have provided quantitative indices of orthographic transparency for Greek. We have compared our
findings with similar data reported for other orthographies
and we have discussed limitations and implications arising
from particular methodological choices and shortcuts previously applied. Our results indicate that restricting the analysis to unrepresentative samples of the orthography, such
as monosyllabic words or word-initial letters, may distort
the outcomes and render cross-linguistic comparisons uninterpretable. However, it remains to be established whether
meaningful cross-linguistic comparison on a common level
of analysis is possible. If the statistical properties of each orthography determine the psychologically dominant units of
processing then transparency analyses may help identify that
unit but will not be amenable to direct comparisons. The critical cross-linguistic work, then, must take place at the theoretical level of representations and processes, along the lines
of dual-route or distributed models of word recognition and
reading aloud.
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17
ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSPARENCY IN GREEK
Appendix
Graphophonemic conversion rules
Table A1: Graphophonemic conversion rules, in order of rank priority. Pre: Preceding context; GRA: Grapheme; Fol:
Following context; PHO: Phoneme; Opt: Optional; Reg: Regularity, i.e., proportion of rule matching opportunities, taking
rank order into account, in which the rule produces the correct pronunciation. Capital latin letters refer to sets of letters (listed
in Table A2) for which the rule applies.
N◦
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
Pre
μ
GRA
αι
αί
α
ά
α
ββ
β
γU
γ
γGU
γG
γ
γG
γ
δδ
δ
U
ε
η
θ
ϊ
ΐ
κκU
κU
κκ
κ
κκ
κ
λλU
λU
λλ
λ
μπ
μπ
μμ
μ
ν
τζ
ζ
ντ
Fol
ύ
V
H
V
H
K
V
ύ
ύ
V
V
H
H
V
V
τ
τZ
PHO
E
"E
"a
"a
a
v
v
J
J
é
é
N
g
G
D
D
ñ
"E
"i
T
i
"i
c
c
c
c
k
k
L
L
l
l
m
b
m
m
n
dz
z
d
Opt
∗
∗
∗
∗
∗
∗
∗
Reg
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
.99
1.00
1.00
.65
.92
.11
1.00
1.00
.99
1.00
—
1.00
.13
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
.00
.34
1.00
.97
1.00
1.00
.43
.45
.99
.98
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
.99
1.00
1.00
1.00
N◦
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
Pre
A
A
A
A
B
W
GRA
ννU
νU
νν
ν
ν
ξ
ου
ού
ππ
π
ρρ
ρ
τF
σv
σvσv
σv
ς
ττ
τ
Yβ
Yφ
Y
Y
ϋ
ΰ
φ
χU
χ
χ
ψ
ω
ώ
U
U
U
T
ε
έ
ο
ό
Fol
V
V
P
L
N
V
H
V
V
PHO
ñ
ñ
n
N
n
ks
u
"u
p
p
R
R
ţ
z
s
s
s
t
t
v
f
v
f
i
"i
f
ç
ç
x
ps
o
"o
ç
J
i
"i
E
"E
o
"o
Opt
∗
∗
∗
∗
∗
Reg
.19
.48
.95
1.00
.99
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
.96
1.00
1.00
1.00
.98
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
.94
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
1.00
.17
.99
1.00
1.00
.97
1.00
.26
.23
.95
1.00
.96
1.00
.99
1.00
18
A. PROTOPAPAS & E. L. VLAHOU
Table A2: Sets of letters defining context or graphemes for the application of graphophonemic conversion rules (Table A1).
Symbol
C
V
S
L
I
E
U
T
H
A
G
Y
Z
B
W
N
P
K
F
Letters in set
β, γ, δ, ζ, θ, κ, λ, μ, ν, ξ, π, ρ, σv, ς, τ, φ, χ, ψ,
γκ, μπ, ντ, τζ
ει, εί, οι, οί, υι, υί, αι, αί, ου, ού, α, ά, ε, έ, η, ή, ι,
ί, ο, ό, υ, ύ, ω, ώ
θ, κ, ξ, π, τ, σv, ς, φ, χ, ψ
β, γ, δ, ζ, λ, μ, ν, ρ, γκ, μπ, ντ, τζ
ει, εί, οι, οί, υι, υί, η, ή, ι, ί, υ, ύ
ε, έ, αι, αί
ει, οι, υι, η, ι, υ
εί, οί, υί, ή, ί, ύ
ει, εί, οι, οί, αι, αί, υι, υί, ε, έ, η, ή, ι, ί, υ, ύ
α, ε, η
γ, κ
υ, ύ
σv, ς, ζ
θ, ξ, π, τ, σv, φ, ψ
β, δ, ζ, ρ, μπ, ντ, τζ
β, γ, δ, ζ, λ, μ, ν, ρ, γκ, μπ, ντ, τζ, α, ά, ε, έ, η,
ή, ι, ί, ο, ό, υ, ύ, ω, ώ, ει, εί, οι, οί, υι, υί, αι, αί,
ου, ού
κ, γ, χ, ξ
χ, ξ, κτ
σv, ς
Description
Consonants
Vowels
Unvoiced consonants (UC)
Voiced consonants (VC)
Vowels [i]
Vowels [E]
Unstressed vowels [i]
Stressed vowels [i]
Front vowels ([i], [E])
Vowels combining with hυi
Consonants forming [g]
Vowels hυi
Sibilants
UC with no palatal variant
VC with no palatal variant
Vowels and voiced consonants
Velar consonants
Velar consonants not forming [g]
Consonants [s]